“This is not just a Cape Cod for the mind, a time to relax before wading back into the sifting and processing. Daydreaming, it turns out, is part and parcel of how the mind works, of how it locates and makes sense of the data we’ve already accreted and the links between them.”

Several players in the Vallejo (Cal.) Symphony have publicly chastised the orchestra’s board for its unanimous vote not to renew the contract of David Ramadanoff, who has served as music director for 33 years. The concertmaster says that “maybe more than half” of the musicians will quit after Ramadanoff’s final concert.

“Social scientist Shiv Visvanathan says frequent calls to ban films are part of a broader malaise in a country where ‘a lot of people have made their careers in sensitivities. There are fringe groups in India which mobilise people around issues of obscenity, dirty movies, dirty pictures.’ Political parties like the Congress are particularly touchy, he says, about films that ‘challenge their folklore’.”

“Down deep, most people are most afraid of this one thing: sounding dumb. New research shows that people shy away from asking for help for fear of appearing less competent, but that this is an unfounded fear: Asking for advice actually makes you seem more capable.”

“The newly renovated halls feature more than 500 artifacts that mainly date back to the Hellenistic period (312-139 B.C.), some of which were retrieved and renovated after the looting of the museum following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.”

The story of barkeep Moe Szyslak – “his oddball beginnings, his pugnacious heart, his rages and joys and astonishing depths – is, in many ways, the story of how The Simpsons went from being a catchphrase-laden pop-culture supernova to one of the most influential cultural works of the late 20th century.”

“The Simpsons debuted in 1989, which means millennials have been watching it since elementary school. … The word [‘meh’] is so important to my millennial lexicon that a search of my Gchat history displays ‘1-20 of many,’ yet by age 30 I had never seen a moment of the show that popularized it.” So Megan Greenwell started binge-watching, and got an education …

“It was the kind of post you might see on a friend’s Instagram account – a quick note Thursday that the ankle surgery went well, lasted a good four hours, and that his foot ‘must be elevated for over a week so I’ll have time to read and watch god knows what on YouTube.'”

“With 175 million monthly listeners, SoundCloud is the second biggest streaming music service in the world behind YouTube. Yet it hasn’t paid royalties to the creators and rightsholders of that music … Today, SoundCloud is taking its first step [to change that], albeit in a carefully-controlled way with a select group of invited partners in the US for its new ‘On SoundCloud’ initiative.”

“A one-man play performed by an illusionist amid a sea of cardboard boxes has won the most coveted theatre prize at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Performance artist Geoff Sobelle’s show [The Object Lesson] will be heading from a tiny room at Summerhall arts centre to the Brooklyn Academy of Music after scooping the prestigious Carol Tambor Award.”

“Once the deal was reached at 3:15 a.m. after a marathon bargaining session, the Met dropped its threat of a lockout and announced that its season would open on schedule on Sept. 22… But while there was a palpable sense of relief that the Met had pulled back from the brink of a serious crisis, challenges remained.”